But what you quoted:

> "In some cases, that's because county officials were mailing notices to unfinished homes or properties without permanent residents. In others, like Rafaeli's case, the notices were delivered to tenants who failed to pass along the information to their landlord, mistakenly believing that the county would inform the landlord separately."

It appears there are many cases where nothing was ignored. Notification wasn't received.

And that's without considering the perverse incentive where it's in the county's best interest to "accidentally" send notices to the wrong address.

> in the county's best interest to "accidentally" send notices to the wrong address.

Yeah, that's a nice way to end up in federal prison and the county to be on the hook to pay everyone back.

PS - According to the article, the house was seized in 2014 for a delinquency on the 2011 taxes. It wasn't something that happened after a single missed notice.

Come on, the owner knows that there is a property tax bill every year, and if they don't receive it on time they should get worried. Everyone knows when their credit card bill should show up and promptly pays even when the post office lost it.

This all depends on how much of a warning you get and such. Obviously if you only get a month's warning or something that would be bad, but if you're warned a year or two in advance I see no problem with this.

Set up a system were you can go to court to challenge it. In cases where notices were sent to the wrong address or you simply forgot interest you should be able to overturn this, sure.

That's not how property ownership works in America.

(However, in Michigan, the term required to acquire title by adverse possession is 15 years.)

That's atrocious. They seize the property and keep the entire proceeds of the auction. That's outlandish. It goes on to say in the article that the properties often go on to speculators who rent them or leave them empty.

But I don't think the whole law is bad because of a couple of mistakes. There should probably be a system to stop seizures from happening over honest mistakes, but the law itself seems like a good idea. We don't get rid of murder laws because sometimes we convict the wrong people, for example.

Sure, if someone has an asset that they aren't paying taxes on you can put a lien against it or maybe even take it in forfeiture. You absolutely can't keep the entirety of the proceeds from a sale above what's owed and maybe the funds for running an auction.

In the end I think they have a fair legal case for recourse. There's no criminal violation and a civil violation isn't enough for complete asset forfeiture.

That's the case with asset forfeiture(there have been many cases where police have literally used that legal tool to have a better salary), fines on poor people(reason literally covered a case about it today) and other methods.

I say this from experience - American police are all shitbags working to enforce the law, not to "Serve and Protect". That Serve and Protect dissipates really fast, when you're mugged... and materializes really fast when a citation is possible.

I'll bet you make weekly non-trivial transactions in every financial account you don't want seized - "well, you obviously weren't actively using these funds, so they've been collected and the county will make better use of them."

It's legalized piracy is what it is.

The government shouldn't be in the business of maximizing profit at the expense of the well being of the people.

There is not one correct thing in your entire post.

We have no proof that said notice was actually received. When you take legal action even as a private citizen the onus is on YOU to ensure communication is received not on them to ensure they received it. If you are going to take a property worth 10s of thousands you can spend a few dollars paying someone to serve a notice.

You may correctly discern that nobody that had actually been thus notified would fail to pay the $8 and thus such service would certainly result in a financial loss. Tack the cost of said service onto the bill or just take the $8 onto the next years bill.

You incorrectly claim that their is either anarchy where nobody pays their taxes or a punitive dystopia where 83 year olds lose their properties over Less than the cost of a value meal at McDonald's and exclude the entire middle ground where virtually all sane governments reside.

A dullard could design a functional middle ground and if you look at the array of imbeciles that work in local government they in fact largely have all over America. A few thoughts from yours truly.

- Require onerous process prior to actually taking a house to ensure that all takings are a result of actual decisions not to pay rather than mischance. Example paying people to actually serve notice to the person and prove receipt or that such service is impossible in extreme cases where someone is missing or impossible to contact. You can reasonably charge someone for this service.

- A fine for nonpayment

- Minimum principal due before you can take a property to ensure that no matter of 8 dollars results in a house being taken. This ensures that you can't simply keep piling on fines until it reaches the minimum.

- A lien on the value of the house for the money due when the property is sold or transferred so that the government gets paid its due.

- A policy of forgiving small discrepancies or miscalculations say under 10 bucks to ensure more money isn't spent on collection than is worthwhile.

The government could affect a net decrease in homelessness by literally taking away properties from wealthy people who own multiples and giving them to the poor. In fact any action that takes away from some and gives to the other makes someone better off. That being the general case doesn't make the specific case of this old fellow losing his house to a predatory system better or said system reasonable.

I either picture a very serious fbi man hauling off the thing while a Norman Rockwellesque families breakfast toast is still sticking out of it or Michael Keaton as Beatlejuice saying we've come for your toaster chuck instead of daughter.

This solves the problem without creating (too large of) a perverse incentive for the county government.

This is a very aggressive law, but there are reasons that the law is written this way. Drawn-out processes to seize property tend to lead to higher levels of vacancy and destruction of the property.

Local governments often don't know who the beneficial owner of a property is, especially with low-end rentals. I used to consult to a local utility. Probably 30% of the properties were owned by LLCs where the owner was unknown. At least a half dozen had bills sent to people known to be dead. In this case you're looking at a landlord in his 80s who doesn't get mail regarding his rental property sent to his home. It sucks, but once there's a lien on the property you're SOL as a property owner.

> It sucks, but once there's a lien on the property you're SOL as a property owner.

That implies that any home with a mortgage means you're SOL. Does this mean ownership is dead? The US has a mix of title-theory and lien-theory states. In lien-theory states, a mortgage counts as a lien on the home. Michigan, in particular, is an intermediary state, in which case the mortgage does have some component of a lien. It gets complicated since each state has it's own rules.

I understand why they might want to have a different process for vacant/unmaintained properties, but in the article it looks like this is happening to occupied properties in good condition (or even actively under construction)!

I also don't understand why it's appropriate to keep the whole house value after auction, even when it's 100x (or in some examples in the article 1000x) the taxes owed and the owner is known.

There's other stuff in the article where it seems like the local governments deliberately want to avoid the owner discovering their tax liability. For example they make the current year's tax bill not mention any existing tax debt (which may be from a different owner). In one example the county treasurer calls the owner of a new home under construction only *after" the deadline, just to tell them that they've been waiting out the clock on the tax debt of a previous owner, and they plan to seize the house and refuse any payment on the balance!

I don't see the public interest in this aside from trying to turn communication issues into huge financial windfalls for local governments (due to asset confiscation), with the perverse incentive that the party responsible for notifying people gets the windfall if that process fails.

The former owner would most probably get ripped off, a lot.